Long story short

The last weeks have been very intense - we introduced a new design for our webpages, a new icon for WorldView and WorldView Live, released WorldView Live 1.1.0 and yesterday WorldView Live 1.2.0!

New website design

But lets tell the story a little bit longer. The website has been in a kinda semi finished state from the beginning, and ever since then we worked on a new design whenever we needed a break from coding on WorldView and clearing our head somewhat. And in the same silence we worked on it we released it 2 weeks ago. For the few people stopping by in here, we hope they appreciate it! There will be some more work being done on integrating the support forums for WorldView into our own website also within the next 2 weeks.

New WorldView icons

Another design topic is the new WorldView and WorldView Live icon which we are happy to have now. They are already used on the website and in WorldView Live. The new icon will also come in with the next release of WorldView. We like them a lot as hopefully you do too ;-)

WorldView Live journey

On the much more important side of WorldView development we did two releases of WorldView Live. Two weeks ago we released 1.1.0 which introduced some bugfixes and also some changes in how webcams refreshes worked. It was intended to calm down some crashing issues we weren't able to solve until then. But sadly most feedback we got was on the negative side again, not liking this new UI style for refreshing webcams. This caused us to work even harder on the crashing issues we got to know via the iTunes Reviews and luckily one of the guys having lots of issues joined the Beta Community Forces ;-) (Thanks Horst!)

While digging into the problems we came around a very strange issue with XCode. Whenever there was a touch on the surface, the app was claiming memory but never releasing it. THAT was strange, since it was completely out of our control or influence. We even removed most of the code only having a white window left, still, same problem. So the only solution was to build the project from scratch and include the old code stepwise into the new project. At the end the project was code-wise completely identical, but these memory problems were gone. FINALLY - but soooo strange. Having this major issue solved we where now also able to dig down the remaining issues we had and solved them within a few days. YES.

After another week of intensive testing we finally had WorldView Live 1.2.0 finished and sent it to Apple for review last monday. Since yesterday evening (CET) the new version is available and now stable stable stable stable!

In the meantime we found one minor issue which causes the app to crash. This happens when you deny the app to detect your location, then open the Nearby tab, click on the Map button on the top right and choose "Current Position" in the alert view coming up. If you click any other button like "Map" or "Cancel" everything is fine. We were able to fix the bug locally so this will also be solved in the next release.

Another thing you might notice is sometimes a stutter when scrolling in fullscreen, this is due to downscaling of the images currently. We will have a solution for this also in the next release!

Sadly we weren't able to have these things sorted out from the beginning and some users found these things very annoying, while others never had any issue. We hope everybody is now as happy as we are with WorldView Live and we are looking forward enhancing it even more in the future!

Oh, I nearly forgot - you really should try out the new map feature! ;-)

So what about the free WorldView edition?

We didn't find the time we wanted to also improve the free edition as the Live edition took a lot of time away. But we are commited to improving this version also, introducing the new maps implementation and more!

One more thing ...

We are very happy to announce that just today, the free edition of WorldView crossed

(fourhundretandfifthythousand) downloads! This is so huge for us. Thanks a lot everybody and we hope you'll enjoy using it also in the future ;-)

End of story

If you have any requests, questions or feedback, please don't hesitate, we love to discuss!